Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900

The English were punished in many different ways in the five centuries after 1500. This collection stretches from whipping to the gallows, and from the first houses of correction to penitentiaries. Punishment provides a striking way to examine the development of culture and society through time. These studies of penal practice explore violence, cruelty and shame, while offering challenging new perspectives on the timing of the decline of public punishment, the rise of imprisonment and reforms of the capital code.

Peel, Pardon, and Punishment: The Recorder's Report Revisited; S. Devereaux Public Punishment and the Manx Ecclesiastical Courts During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries; J. R. Dickinson & J. A. Sharpe Bodies and Souls in Norwich: Punishing Petty Crime, 1540-1700; P. Griffiths Dean Men Talking: Truth, Texts, and the Scaffold in Early Modern England; K. R. Harris Punishing Pardons: Some Thoughts on the Origin of Penal Transportation; C. Herrup Shame and Pain: The Renaissance of Corporal Punishment in Tudor England; M. Ingram The Problem of Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England; R. McGowen The Gortian Moment: Natural Penal Rights and Republicanism; M. Rigstad A Convenient Degree of Blindness: Punitive Violence and the English Press, 1650-1700; P. Rosenberg Streets of Shame? The Crowd and Public Punishments in London, 1700-1820; R. S. Shoemaker I Could Hang Anything You Can Bring Before Me: England's Willing Executioners in 1883; G. T. Smith Index